Slicing Virtualized EPC-based 5G Core Network for Content Delivery

Traditional Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) built with traditional Internet technology are less and less able to cope with today's tremendous growth of content. Information Centric Networks (ICN), a proposed future Internet technology, may aid in remedying the situation. Unlike the current Internet, it decouples information from its sources and provides in-network storage. We expect traditional CDN and ICN-based CDN to co-exist in the foreseeable future, especially as it is now known that it might be possible to evolve traditional CDNs to gain the benefits promised by ICN. 5G providers must therefore aim to offer core network slices on which both ICN-based CDNs and traditional CDNs can be built. These slices could of course also be offered to providers of other applications with requirements similar to those of content delivery. This paper tackles the problem of slicing 5G for content delivery over ICN-based CDNs and traditional CDNs. Only virtualized Evolved Packet Core (EPC)-based 5G is considered. The problem is defined as a resource allocation problem which aims at minimizing the cost of slice assignment, while meeting QoS requirements. An Integer linear programming (ILP) formulation is provided and evaluated in a small-scale scenario.